Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets. Players build space ships, space stations, planetary outposts of various sizes and uses, pilot ships and travel through space to explore planets and gather resources to survive.

User reviews:

Recent:

Very Positive
(1,422 reviews)
- 84% of the 1,422 user reviews in the last 30 days are positive.

Overall:

Very Positive
(54,982 reviews)
- 89% of the 54,982 user reviews for this game are positive.

Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

“Space Engineers is an Early Access game, which means that it is still under development but already in a very playable state and contains a vast amount of new features that have been added since its first release (e.g. Multiplayer, Survival mode). The game is being improved on a regular basis through updates that add and polish features and content, optimizations and bug fixes.

We invite you to give us your feedback and suggestions to help us create the best game possible.

Buy Medieval Engineers and Space Engineers

December 8

Hello Engineers! We are very happy to announce that today, we have a massive update for you, the one that’s been months in making. There’s the total block redesign, new multiplayer netcode, a tutorial campaign and much, much more!

December 1

Hello Engineers! Today, we have more bug fixes for you. We are extremely busy preparing some pretty big updates coming in the next couple of weeks and we hope that you’ve all had time to experiment with the new multiplayer prototypes that we made available last update. Since then, there’s been an incredible amount of useful feedback posted across various platforms and we thank everyone for their help. The teams were able to gather large amounts of information from the crashes and bugs that may have been difficult to find had these evaluations not been public.

In other news, we will be streaming on the Keen Community Network tonight on Twitch. To start with, there will be a section on Medieval Engineers looking at the upcoming farming update. After that, members from the different Space Engineers multiplayer teams will discuss the methods and approaches used for improving multiplayer. And finally, to finish the night, Marek will come on to talk more about multiplayer, the games in general and maybe even a bit about GoodAI. So please tune in at 19:00 CET to Keen Community Network on Twitch.tv! https://www.twitch.tv/keencommunitynetwork

Reviews

“Space Engineers makes welding, joining and glazing seem like the best jobs in the world. It looks superb.”
Rock Paper Shotgun

“Buy, unless you are bereft of even the slightest shred of creativity”
PCGamesN

“Space Engineers generates its own unique brand of fun, whether you're more interested in constructing things or blasting them to bits”
IGN

About This Game

Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets. Players build space ships, space stations, planetary outposts of various sizes and uses (civil and military), pilot ships and travel through space to explore planets and gather resources to survive. Featuring both creative and survival modes, there is no limit to what can be built, utilized and explored.

Space Engineers features a realistic, volumetric-based physics engine: everything in the game can be assembled, disassembled, damaged and destroyed. The game can be played either in single or multiplayer modes.

Space Engineers is inspired by reality and by how things work. Think about modern-day NASA technology extrapolated 60 years into the future. Space Engineers strives to follow the laws of physics and doesn't use technologies that wouldn't be feasible in the near future.

Space Engineers concentrates on construction and exploration aspects, but can be played as a survival shooter as well. We expect players will avoid engaging in direct man-to-man combat and instead use their creativity and engineering skills to build war machines and fortifications to survive in space and on planets. Space Engineers shouldn’t be about troops; it should be about the machinery you build.

Starting Worlds - Earth Easy Start - start on a habitable planet with a set of basic vehicles. Your survival is threatened by attacking pirates who set up shop within range of their drones.
- Mars Easy Start - become a colonist on a barren, inhospitable planet. Make sure you secure a source of water soon. Also beware of local pirates.
- Alien Easy Start – the alien planet is a place with very sparse oxygen, not enough to breath freely. There is hostile fauna and pirates who want to claim the riches of this mysterious world and are not willing to share.
- Moon Easy Start – You start on a moon orbiting a habitable planet. Your base is under attack by pirates.
- Empty Star System - It is a star system with 3 distinctive planets and their 3 moons. Except for local fauna, planets are uninhabited.
- Easy Start 1 – start on an asteroid platform with one large ship and two small ships
- Easy Start 2 – start in a green asteroid station with several large and small ships (this is a large scene!)
- Lone Survivor – start on an abandoned asteroid platform with no ships
- Crashed Red Ship – your mother ship just crashed...
- Two Platforms – competitive two-team multi-player world
- Asteroids – start in a rescue ship with very limited resources
- Empty World – no asteroids, no ships; suitable for creative mode

Enemy NPCs - sabiroids (spiders): can be found on alien planets and on Titan moons. They can destroy metal blocks and attack players. Their favorite hunting strategy is hiding in the ground and un-burrow to surprise their prey. When players kill a spider, new spiders won’t appear in the area for some time. They also store some components inside their bodies from objects and blocks that they consumed.
- pirate bases: can be found either in space or occupying planetary surface. They have bounty hidden inside their containers that players can loot if they get over the drone attacks.
- enemy drones: they spawn automatically from pirate bases and attack the players when they venture into pirate territory

Ships (small and large ships – build them, pilot them and crush them

Space stations

First-person & Third-person

Planetary bases, outposts, cities!

Dedicated servers - allow players to connect to a third party host, rather than using a player-host, in a peer-to-peer set-up. The result is a faster connection and a more fluent multiplayer performance with less lag

Super-large worlds – the size of the world to 1,000,000,000 km in diameter (almost infinite)

Procedural asteroids - adds an infinite number of asteroids to the game world

Exploration - adds an infinite number of ships and stations to the game world; discover, explore, acquire and conquer!

Drilling / harvesting

Manual building in survival mode – use welder to assemble blocks from components; use grinder to disassemble and reuse components

Scenario editor - players can create missions and game modes which can be played by other players. Capture the flag, deathmatch, racing or campaign driven missions - all can be done by using the scenario editor, with your own rules and designs

Custom colors for blocks – Customize your creations by using any color you like

Cargo ships - auto-piloted vessels (miners, freighters and military) that carry ore, ingots, constructions components and other materials from sector to sector. They can be looted but beware, they often contain booby traps!

Conveyor, Collector, Connector (IMPORTANT: this is a first work-in-progress version and a realistic version will be added later) - Conveyors move items from inventory to inventory. Collectors can collect small objects (ore, ingots, components, tools) into inventory. Connectors can throw items from inventory to space (in future update could be used to connect two ships/stations and transfer items)

Artificial mass – can be used to add gravity-affected mass to ships, useful in machine ships or cars

Wheels - use them with rotors and artificial mass to build vehicles

Automated turrets – gatling, missile and interior. Turrets are used mostly as defense mechanism rather than shooting other players. They aim on decoys (automatically by default), meteorites, missiles or all moving objects (eg. small/large ships) - targeting can be changed in the control panel

Large weapons - missile launcher (for large ships)

Large and small ship grinder and welder – assemble and disassemble blocks faster and in larger amount

Batteries - enables players to store the energy generated by solar panels or reactors at an efficiency rate of 80%

Pistons - offers the option to build more advanced machinery

Ion thrusters – suitable for environments without atmosphere (space or moons) / not recommended to be used on planets with atmosphere

Hydrogen - hydrogen thrusters, hydrogen tanks and hydrogen bottles

Atmospheric thrusters - powered by electricity, working only on planets with atmosphere

Factions - create and join factions, determine ownership of blocks and manage the relations between them (hostile/ally). NOTE: Factions are currently Work-in-Progress. There are still many things to be added (eg. chat and communication) and some bugs/issues are yet to be fixed.

Remote ship control – control ships without being inside the ship’s cockpit (drones)

Modding API - brings a lot of new possibilities to modders and allows them to alter the game by writing C# scripts which have access to in-game objects (WIP - more features will be added in the future)

Blueprints - save your ship or station on a blueprint and paste it into your game

How to Play

Performance Notes

Space Engineers is in development and undergoing frequent optimizations. The performance will get better.

The performance depends on the complexity of your world and the configuration of your computer. Simple worlds run smoothly even on low-end computers, but a more complex world with rich object interactions could overload even high-end computers.